THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
107 
The boy's faith did not flag, — even after repeated fail- 
ures — at their non-appearance, and when, only with the as- 
sistance of a hair-pin, was one uneartehd, he still did not lose 
confidence that they usually came when called. We watched 
one of these grotesque little creatures excavating its house. 
It worked beneath the earth, travelling backward, round and 
round, tossing the sand, sending it twice the length of its own 
body, till it fell in a tiny shower far from the hole. When it 
had made a perfectly round depression, an inch deep, it waited, 
with only the tips of its antennae uncovered, for its unwary 
prey. 
Nolin River, a small stream that flows into Green River, 
of whose wild and grand scenery we had often heard, was the 
next point of interest that we visited. Though it was off the 
general line of travel and away from railroads, we were not 
deterred from going. In the local vernacular, we went to the 
'*yan side" of the river. We drove four miles towards the 
river in a farm wagon. Our driver and guide could have 
posed for Riley's ''Raggedy Man," — a more ragged and also 
more listless and spiritless creature I had never before beheld. 
He surprised us by saying as we passed a cave in the cliff, — 
"If I was in the moonshinin' business now, I wouldn't want 
nothin, better' this place." He "holped his daddy when he was 
in that business," he said. 
We found board at a log cabin near the little river. The 
bare-footed wife and children crowded about us and we learned 
much of life among these wild hills and cliffs. The husband, 
too, had been a moonshiner, and he told us with pride that he 
had ''only been took up four times." After seeing so much 
of these endless caves and cliffs one is quite surprised that the 
revenue officers ever succeeded in finding these law-breakers. 
When I expressed as much to this man, he said that they 
would never have found his "still" if a neighbor had not got 
mad and reported him. They speak of moonshining — of 
